Sanitized Slop

Polish used to signal taste. Now it signals someone's buying something.

A robotics founder asked me on Monday what the next three to six months look like for how startups announce themselves on the big stage. He shoots movies in his spare time and builds frontier AI during the day, so he asks about mediums the way film people ask about film. The default method over the last few years has been launch videos. What’s the next one?

I honestly didn’t have a good answer during the call but I have been thinking about it since then.

My honest reaction to launch videos is just.. nothing. Thumb scroll to the next tweet way before the three second attention grabbing preview. Watching these I guess has been part of a VCs job, but I have felt my own attention drop every time a new one hits the timeline. Same script: very dramatic, very expensive, doesn’t tell any resemblance of a story. No customer anywhere in it. Chest beating, portraying yourself as more than you are so people FOMO into the product, the round, who you are as a brand. Two minutes of film (or writing) whose real job is just boosting your valuation.

I have started calling all of this “sanitized slop”.

Luckily I think people are seeing through this. Two million views, eight comments. That ratio should embarrass someone. Paid partnerships on X doing the work attention used to do. VCs whose reach is bought, not earned, posting about authenticity. The human eye turns out to be very good at detecting slop. Nobody can articulate what’s off about any specific video, but the smell is there.

Some still escape the exponential, there’s always one great video a quarter. But polish stopped meaning what it used to. It used to signal money and taste. Now it mostly signals someone’s buying something.

What comes next? It goes retro. Back to what worked before any of this. Less aesthetic, more nature. Products out in the wild instead of a studio. Twitch style, in person. Ums and ahs. Typos. The customer in the picture instead of a founder explaining why they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Show the outcome and disappear. The “human era”, basically. Authenticity wins because customer obsession is the one thing nobody’s figured out how to buy.

The box office is running the same experiment at a hundred times the budget. Obsession cost under a million dollars and outgrossed a new Star Wars movie this spring. Backrooms just became A24’s biggest film ever, and the director is a 20 year old who got his start posting horror videos from his bedroom.

So you still have to launch. Distribution matters, making noise to stand out matters, nobody’s exempt from telling the world they exist. But a launch is the last step, not the first. Find the customer who won’t shut up about you, point the camera at them and get out of frame. If you can’t find an obsessed customer yet, no refinements will help. Probably just go back to work.